A Woman Is No Man

In her brief Prologue, Rum’s protagonist addresses her audience directly: “I was born without a voice” (1). She confesses she has never told her story because “where I come from, voicelessness is the condition of my gender” (1). She is born in New York, and Rum zooms in cinematically from a wide angle: first Manhattan; then, gradually narrowing her focus, she takes her readers through urban canyons and crowded streets, across the Brooklyn Bridge into Bay Ridge, a vibrant, multicultural neighborhood full of the sights, smells, and sounds of ethnic diversity. She finally settles on the place of her birth, “an old row house no different from the others—faded red brick, a dusty brown door, number 545” (3). This house, however, is the present, and to arrive here, Rum notes, we must begin in the past: Palestine, 1990.

Rum introduces Isra, a 17-year-old Palestinian girl living with her family in Birzeit, Palestine, in 1990. Their house is perched on a hilltop overlooking Christian and Muslim cemeteries. From her window, she can see much of her village below. She is curious about what lies beyond, but she is afraid to venture out because her culture tells her “a woman belongs at home” (6).